Telling a Different Story About Africa

The first episode of “An African City” has been viewed more than half a million times on YouTube.

In a warehouse in Accra, a lady with a sleek wig yells at a customs agent who is holding her packages for no clear reason. She wants him to retrieve an extremely important item from her boxes. “It’s shaped like a cricket stick,” she says, her posh voice charged with innuendo. Then, the punch line: “It’s about ten inches long.”

This is Ghana, but the joke is meant to recall a Manhattanite: Samantha Jones, of “Sex and the City.” Our updated heroine is Sade Afolabi, a Harvard-educated woman who has returned to the city of her birth, and who feels stymied by this holdup of one of her key U.S. goodies. Sade, played with gusto by the Ghanaian-American actress Nana Mensah, alarms the agent by mentioning that her father is Nigerian. He calls in the cops, sure that she’s smuggling drugs. Vibrators, it seems, aren’t on his radar.

This scene is from the fourth episode of “An African City,” a Web series that wraps up its second season on April 17th. The show’s first episode has been viewed more than half a million times on YouTube; the series has also aired on the African network EbonyLife TV and on A+, an offshoot of the French channel Canal, distributed in France and Africa. The show’s premise is indebted to “Sex and the City,” but its creator, Nicole Amarteifio, told me that she figured out how she could make “An African City” by watching something else: “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl,” the Web series created by Issa Rae, which premièred in 2011. At the time, Amarteifio was living in Washington, D.C., and working for the World Bank as a social-media strategist, with a focus on Africa. She had a vague notion about changing the popular narrative about the continent; in Rae, whose father is from Senegal, she saw a kindred spirit. Rae “didn’t see herself in media,” Amarteifio explained over lunch in Manhattan recently. “She took it upon herself to do something.”

In February, Amarteifio spoke in Vancouver at a TED conference attended by show-biz luminaries, including Meg Ryan and Shonda Rhimes. After her talk, Amarteifio told me, Jenji Kohan, the creator of “Orange Is the New Black,” approached her to say that she enjoyed the show. Amarteifio brightened like a fan recalling the moment. When our conversation turned to the other main reason for the trip—meetings with American TV networks—her tone changed to one of careful professionalism. “I hope I can articulate this right,” she said, when I asked about how the talks were going. “What I think networks have to understand is that, beyond being an African story, it’s a human story. Women around the world are relating to this show.… We get e-mails from China, Korea, Thailand, Puerto Rico, Italy.”

The protagonist of “An African City” is Nana Yaa, a journalist—she’s the Carrie of the group—who is played by MaameYaa Boafo. Nana Yaa and her friends both navigate and question the cultural norms that shape their encounters with men, from the married ones looking for something on the side—a more socially accepted practice in Ghana than in the U.S.—to an African-American lawyer so driven to remember the legacy of slavery that he visits Ghana’s bleakest tourist attraction, a coastal fort where slaves were sold, a dozen times. One of the show’s central characters breaks it off with that lawyer after she discovers that her own great-great-grandmother was a slave trader. “I get it!” she wails, after admitting that Africans were complicit in America’s great sin. “But that does not incapacitate me from moving forward!” With this show, the “Sex and the City” comparisons only get you so far.

Most of the show’s viewers live in the United States, Amarteifio told me, and the fan base goes well beyond the African diaspora. Still, she worries that networks will doubt the breadth of its appeal. François Deplanck, a Canal executive, expressed skepticism that the show could have an audience in France beyond the country’s African communities. “It’s hard to sell a black cast,” he said, when I asked him about it. Amarteifio again saw an analogue with Issa Rae, whose initial flirtations with prime-time networks ended badly, as Jenna Wortham reported in the Times Magazine. One executive wanted to change her character to an “awkward Indian boy,” and another wanted to cast a light-skinned, straight-haired actress. Even after Rae signed on with HBO, the network balked at Rae’s “wish list” of hires for the planned series, many of them young women of color. “Generally, an HBO spokeswoman said, the network wants people who have experience,” Wortham wrote.

That demand for experience can seem like a riddle: to get it, one must somehow already have it. And so Amartieifo modelled herself on Rae, pulling off the first season without any institutional help. Like Rae, she relied on friends. Nana Mensah is a former classmate from Loomis Chaffee, a prep school in Connecticut, where she caught Amarteifio’s eye when she staged a one-woman show about body image and cultural clashes in her immigrant family. After college, Mensah landed a few “spear-holder” roles, she told me, appearing in Shakespeare in the Park one summer, alongside Meryl Streep. But by the time Amarteifio asked her to fly to Ghana for two months of filming, she was mostly trudging from one bad audition to another. One of the last parts she read for before boarding the flight, she said, was a Haitian witch doctor on “Law & Order.”

Amarteifio told me that she and her co-executive producer, Millie Monyo, who was born in the United States and now lives in Ghana, and who had worked in reality television, saw the entire first season of “An African City” as a sort of extended pilot. The show’s lo-fi production values are certainly not for everyone: the sound quality varies, the lighting in the sex scenes is a bit harsh, and the restaurant scenes lack the bustle and clatter that a bevy of extras can provide. Still, on the day after she uploaded the first episode, Amarteifio told me that she had an e-mail in her inbox from someone at BET, expressing interest in discussing distribution. (BET declined to comment on ongoing negotiations regarding the show.)

Rather than returning to YouTube, Amartefeio and Monyo put the second season on a new platform called VHX; the full season costs twenty dollars. “We made more in a twenty-four-hour period on VHX than we did in two million views in two years on YouTube,” Amarteifio said. But some fans are disappointed that the show is no longer free. To access VHX programming, a viewer needs a credit card, something that many Africans do not have.

Indeed, just as many critics of “Sex and the City” lamented its focus on well-to-do women, a common complaint about “An African City” is that it is only concerned with upper-crust fashionistas who have American passports and family ties to Kofi Annan (or “Uncle Kofi,” as Sade refers to the former Secretary-General of the United Nations). But the idea, Amarteifio reiterated, was never to “make an African version of ‘The Brady Bunch.’ ” By depicting a narrow slice of life, Amarteifio believes that she’s diversifying the larger narrative about Africa. For years, “sadness stories,” as Amma Aboagye, a fan of the series who recently moved back to Ghana after completing a graduate degree at Columbia, calls them, were practically the only African stories that got told at all.

Aboagye told me that African storytellers have a particular responsibility to tell narratives that are different than the ones we’ve heard before. Outsiders so frequently strip Africa of all depth that in the minds of many, she said, “the continent doesn’t have countries. It’s this one big mass of land with one homogenous culture.” Speaking on WhatsApp, she recounted the thrill of seeing the complexities of life in Ghana parsed in “An African City,” from the married men who are “still game”—“a very real sentiment here on the continent,” she said—to watching a veritable “F.B.I. squad of friends” investigating any potential love interest to find out “his last name, who’s his family, which is his church.” Echoing a generation of “Sex and the City” diehards, she explained that her interest in the show has less to do with what happens between the main characters and the men in their lives and more to do with what passes between the women when the men are not around. “The sex is to me, like, so irrelevant,” she said.